How Team Takedown is changing the approach to building MMA champions

Marc Laimon and Johny Hendricks didn’t exactly hit it off at first. Back when they started working together – way before “Johny vision” and the back-to-back UFC welterweight title fights – the first thing they had to figure out was what time of day they would meet for training sessions.

It turned out to be tougher than you’d think.

“Johny initially hated me because I wanted to work at 10 in the morning,” Laimon told MMAjunkie. “He wanted to go later because he was up until four in the morning playing video games.”

The whole thing could have fallen apart right there. Relationships in this sport have certainly been derailed by less. But fortunately for Laimon, Hendricks needed him. And fortunately for Hendricks, he’d come to the right coach.

Team Takedown founder Ted Ehrhardt, who was funding Hendricks’ foray into cage fighting with his upstart management company, realized that much right away. That’s why these days Laimon is on the Team Takedown payroll, along with the fighters he coaches.

It’s a setup that’s very different from most fighter-coach relationships in MMA. The fact that it’s resulted in a UFC welterweight title for Hendricks, Laimon said, is a sign that it works.

“It’s a really unique atmosphere that can accelerate the learning process, and Johny’s proof of that,” Laimon said. “The Team Takedown set-up, it allows a coach to really be the architect of a fighter’s game from the ground up, instead of just the curator in a museum.”

That wasn’t the plan starting out, according to Ehrhardt. When Team Takedown kicked off in 2007, it had a very simple vision — too simple, as it turned out.

“When we first started, I didn’t know anything about the MMA world,” said Ehrhardt. “I was a fan, period. I had no knowledge of management.”

After hiring four-time All-American wrestler Jake Rosholt to coach a local youth wrestling club, Ehrhardt started thinking. He’d heard all the stories from fighters who had to work regular jobs during the day and squeeze in their MMA training at night.

“I thought, ‘Man, if I just paid him and all he had to do was train, it wouldn’t take him more than two or three years and he’ll be at the top,’” Ehrhardt said. “Little did I know, it doesn’t quite work that way.”

The first problem he ran into was coaching. More precisely, it was the lack of it. Ehrhardt had installed Rosholt in the Xtreme Couture gym in Las Vegas, which was something of a magnet for pro fighters of all experience levels at the time. But Rosholt was purely a wrestler. He had no background in the other aspects of MMA, and he wasn’t getting much help on the mats at Xtreme Couture. The way Ehrhardt remembers it, even the gym’s owner, former UFC champion Randy Couture, saw trouble brewing.

“Randy called me and said, ‘Ted, you’ve got to do something about Jake. He’s just coming into the pro practice and getting beat up. He’s just trying to learn by getting beat up, and that’s not the way to do it,’” Ehrhardt said.

But the wrestlers, they didn’t know any other way. Take Hendricks, who Ehrhardt had convinced to try his hand at MMA after his NCAA wrestling career ended in disappointment in 2007, when he fell short of a third national title at the end of his senior year at Oklahoma State University. The first time he laced up the gloves for a sparring session at Xtreme Couture he got knocked out cold by MMA veteran Phil Baroni.

It might have helped him realize what he was getting into with this sport, but it didn’t do much to give him the knowledge or skills he’d need to succeed in it. That’s where Laimon came in. He was running the nearby Cobra Kai Jiu-Jitsu gym at the time, and it wasn’t long before Hendricks and Rosholt found their way over there for a training session.

“They came in pretty raw, and no one was really helping them out,” Laimon said. “They were at Xtreme Couture’s and, at the time, there was like one coach on the mat for 40 or 50 guys there. There’s no way, especially when you’re that green, that you’re going to get anything out of that. You need someone to show you the basics. If you don’t have a coach to help you step-by-step, especially during that beginning process, it can be like you’re treading water.”

Slowly, at first, Laimon started to become that coach for the Team Takedown fighters. Their skill sets began to round out, they started winning fights, and it looked like Ehrhardt’s plan for turning wrestlers into fighters might succeed after all.

“But,” Ehrhardt said, “pretty much my guys are all country boys. Vegas isn’t the place for a guy who loves the country.”

That’s how Team Takedown moved its operations to Texas, first to a rundown gym known simply as, “The Gym,” where they could train for free as long as they didn’t mind the lack of air conditioning or showers or locker rooms, and then eventually in their own space once they discovered that, matter of fact, they did need those things after all.

As Ehrhardt put it, “We were kind of forced to buy a gym. It wasn’t like we planned it that way from the start.”

They also needed their own dedicated coaches to run that gym. And after their experiences in Las Vegas, Ehrhardt said, Laimon wasn’t just on the list, he was the list.

But Laimon’s gym in Vegas was just starting to thrive. Picking up and moving to Texas initially didn’t sound so great, he admitted, “but then I just thought, you know, this is what I’ve always said I wanted to do. I wanted to work with high-level athletes and produce champions.”

He also liked the idea of being able to concentrate only on training a select few fighters (Team Takedown’s roster is currently limited to four active fighters), without all the other headaches that most coaches in this sport have to deal with.

“In MMA, how many times have you heard trainers complain about not getting paid?” Laimon said. “You work with a guy and he starts having success, then it’s like, ‘I’m going to go work with someone else,’ just so he doesn’t have to pay you. That’s one of the most heartbreaking and crushing things on this side of the business. You help guys and then when they get a big contract they’re basically like, ‘F–k you, I’m not going to pay you.’ But with the way Team Takedown is set up, I never missed a check. Not once. They treated me so well, and I saw the way they treated the fighters so well, it took a little bit of faith, but I always thought it was going to work.”

Here’s where you start to do the math on the money that Ehrhardt and his co-owners have pumped into Team Takedown. Between the gym, the living expenses for each fighter and coach, a weekly paycheck, plus health and dental insurance, Ehrhardt estimates that he’s already put between $4 and 5 million into the company.

It’s a sizable investment for an MMA management company. It’s also why Team Takedown takes a 50 percent cut of its fighters’ earnings, which is unheard of among most MMA managers.

Then again, most managers don’t fund a fighter’s existence year-round, beginning before he even has a pro fight to his credit. They don’t pay for his coaches, either, or provide him with health insurance. Even with such a sizable cut of each fighter’s pay, Ehrhardt said, the only way he can recoup his investment is if his fighters eventually start making big money, which can be very hard to come by in this sport.

“I said from the very beginning, the only way I get my money back is if I have a champion,” Ehrhardt said. “I knew I had to have a champion. Not even the number two or three guys are making enough to get me my money back. It’s got to be a champion and it’s got to be a good one. Now we have one.”

According to Laimon, the reason they have one has a lot to do with Team Takedown’s approach to keeping the team small and the focus squarely on the fighters. Other gyms might have dozens of pros with only a few coaches, at which point, Laimon said, the quality of each individual’s training may start to decline.

“You might have a lot of good bodies there, but at some point you need a coach around to make sure the focus is on you,” said Laimon. “If there are 30 other guys competing for that person’s attention, that’s a tall order for anybody.”

Of course, it also helps to have an athlete the caliber of Hendricks. Not only is he physically “just on a whole other level,” according to Laimon, he also some important gifts between his ears.

There’s his ability to see everything his opponent is doing or wants to do (hence Laimon’s exhortation to him to get his “Johny vision” on before the last round of his fight with Lawler at UFC 171), and also his ability to gut through a rather serious arm injury in order to claim the welterweight title.

But the fact that he developed so quickly from a pure wrestler into a well-rounded fighter, Laimon said, has a lot to do with the individual attention that Team Takedown’s approach afforded him.

“I think eventually you’re going to see a shift to smaller camps, camps that are more focused on one fighter,” Laimon said. “It’s a very different venture than anything else I’ve seen in MMA, and I’ve been in it since UFC 18, when Bas [Rutten] fought [Tsuyoshi] Kosaka. I cornered three guys that night. To see where it was then to where it is now, there’s still nothing like Team Takedown in MMA.

“It’s like Floyd Mayweather, he doesn’t show up to practice at a gym with 50 other guys and say, ‘Hey coach, which one of these 50 other guys am I sparring tonight?’” Laimon added. “He has four coaches show up and they’re all focused on him, because that’s what a fighter needs to perform at his best. We’re pretty close to replicating that.”

But then, it’s one thing to do that in boxing, where a fighter like Mayweather earns eye-popping figures with every fight. In MMA it’s still tough to tell whether such a model is sustainable. A 50 percent split in exchange for weekly paychecks and all living expenses paid might sound like a great idea to a fighter who’s just starting out, but what about once he’s become the champ, as Hendricks has? Will he still think he’s getting a good deal, or will he be tempted to look for another, more immediately profitable arrangement?

It’s something Ehrhardt has considered, he said, but not something he spends a lot of time fretting over. For one thing, he said, he has a contract with Hendricks.

“But more importantly, we have a relationship,” Ehrhardt said. “Me and Johny, we’re like family. It’d be the same as him turning his back on his family, and if you know Johny you know that’s never going to happen. Our families go camping together, we’re invested in businesses together. I mean, anything’s possible in this world, but that’s the least of my concerns.”

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